By Panasonic is coming out with an Android tablet for businesses. It’s going to be called the Panasonic Toughpad and is a large rugged slate that is about as ugly as Cerberus but also as touch as Cerberus. This isn’t your traditional Android tablet as Panasonic has specifically made it to interface with their Viera Smart television units.
Using WiFi you can send content to and pull content from your television. For instance, if you have a photo or a webpage on your Toughpad you can “flick” it up to the TV and it’ll show up there. Similarly, you can bring content from the TV to the tablet (perhaps you found some directions to a restaurant and you want to take it with you).
The tablet can also be used as an oversized remote control among other things. Panasonic said they don’t currently have plans to bring the Toughpad to common consumers. I found that odd considering none of their use-cases showed the device being used in a busniess sense.
Overall the idea of the tablet and smart TV combo seemed pointless to me. The use cases all involved sharing content between the tablet and the TV and I don’t think many business people have a need for something like this.
The only thing I can think of to make this make sense is that the Toughpad was just being used as a showcase unit with a consumer model currently being planned and developed for distribution soon. Don’t quote me on that at all. See for yourself above.
Panasonic rep brought one of these to showcase to our IT desktop. We torn this rep apart. It has no use in a PC ran company. Majority of corporate america is PC run. It wouldnt interact with windows server for monitoring. We’d have to just view our internal monitor on our internal network via the browser. Pointless. And the rep said there woyld be no plans for ever releasing to consumers directly. Makes sense. There laptop Toughbooks arent available directly to consumers.
You can just use your android phone or apple products.
BTW it is so freakin heavy. And ugly.
I’m suprised more isn’t made of the direction this type of thing is going for education. This has huge uses in the classroom as well as for meetings, sales pitches ,etc. China has just annonced an innitiative for moving textbooks to a digital pad based format. This is something that should be happening in the united states as well.